First things first. It’s not a “comfort stop”. It’s a piss. Or a pee. Or a public display of bladder emptying. “Comfort stop” is yet another idiotic euphemism that has entered the road riding lexicon, along with the equally irritating “nature break”. I’m sure it won’t be long before saddle sores are referred to as “pressure pimples”, and emergency defecation as “dropping a powerbar”. For the record, a comfort stop is when you stop riding in favour of lounging in comfort. Rather like Big Jan and the Klodenmeister in the image below.
Right then, sportives. I rode the Hell of the Ashdown at the weekend. An excellent early season event on some fabulous roads, well-organised, well-signposted, and pleasantly challenging. I rode most of the circuit south of the M25 last November, but managed to go off route a few times, and so had been looking forward to riding the course without having to resort to the repeated extraction of a dog-eared map from my jacket pocket.
The thing that’s weird though is the manifestation of competitiveness in the cyclosportive environment. As a low-level amateur road and mountain bike cyclist (with aspirations towards low-level amateur cycle racing) I try to affect an air of casual indifference towards competition, the overtaking of others, timings, speeds, and the multitude of other metrics that define performance. Over-competitiveness when you’re crap is not only something to be ashamed of, it can be so cringeworthy when considered in retrospect that you sometimes question whether it was you acting like that rather than some sort of auto-character-assassinating doppelganger. Not everyone shares this trait. Many riders are content to pootle around, not phased at all when they are passed, and when they pass others it barely registers. (Of course, you shouldn’t confuse those people with the ones who are also affecting the aforementioned indifference with a greater degree of verisimilitude than I am usually able to muster. They smile gamely when they’re overtaken and you think, “What a nice chap” when in fact said chap is already plotting your death by water bottle beating. These are the same people that, when the shoe is on the other foot and they are on the attack, pedal up to their intended victim with all the gusto of a Olympic pursuit finalist and then just before they come into view, take a deep breath, relax on the tops and cruise past like a Frenchman delivering onions.)
I, on the other hand, admit freely and honestly that I am a compulsively over-competitive cyclist. If I get overtaken (whether it’s by an old lady on a Brompton or a heavily doped European professional (both examples being entirely that as, to my knowledge, neither have actually occurred) it spoils my day to the extent that, unless you’re planning to announce a second series of Nathan Barley, you would be best advised to stay well out of my way, at least until the following morning. If the reverse occurs, and I manage to overtake somebody myself, especially if that person is aboard a fancier bike than mine, joy and rapture, the black mist is lifted and I sing and dance and offer to pay for people’s shopping in the supermarket.
I find the sportive atmosphere very slightly weird because it’s not a race, but there are plenty of people treating it like one. We chose to ride the Hell at a moderately steady pace, and stopped at both the feed stations as well as at the time control in the Ashdown Forest. As such, I had to bite my tongue when one of the many overtakers made some snide comment (as I would’ve done, probably) about what my (borrowed) Powertap meter might be registering as I span gently up the hill. I ended up not really interested in my time, knowing that time had not been the main aim of the day – a sociable ride with my chums in the spring sunshine.
But within 12 hours I was poring over the finish list, correlating positions with the lap breakdown on my Garmin. Obsessing over the minutae of power levels. Figuring out how much better placed I would’ve been if (a) I hadn’t stopped (admittedly this would’ve meant that I would’ve missed the self-styled Alf Cappuccino, purveyor of overfilled cups of tea and Tommy Cooper recitals at the Ide Hill feed station), (b) if I’d pushed hard from the start rather than the better late than never effort at the end, and (c) if I’d roared like a lion and ridden around with my mouth wide open like Michael Boogerd.
The culmination of all this cerebral timewasting is that (a) my fiancé has yet again drawn attention to the underlying inferiority complex driving all this mental effort, (b) I have set myself a target of riding the event in under 4 hours next year, and (c) I have decided that I need to do some road races.
You see, I’ve figured out that road racing is probably the ultimate cure for an over-competitive streak. Last time I did one (a SERRL event at Fowlmead) I managed to stick with the bunch for about twenty minutes before getting unceremoniously dropped. It proved in an instant, and with undeniable, absolute clinical precision, that I was crap, unfit and tactically retarded. There is no messing around when it comes to a race. Nowhere to hide, no excuses. It must be done…
(I’ve just realised that, out of the four pictures of me at the Hell, I (entirely unintentionally though probably subconsciously decisively) chose to use the one in which I’m overtaking someone. The icing on the cake, etc.)